Indeterminacy- spatial, temporal, and above all, emotional- is the
central motif of Sue de Beer's absorbing two-channel video installation,
Black Sun, 2004-2005. While it contains the exploration of adolescent
desire and frustration that's earned de Beer a reputation as the
preeminent auteur of teen angst, the new work also suggests an artist
who is herself maturing, moving away from the often melodramatic
physical abjection of her earlier works into a more nuanced
investigation of psychological alienation.

As in previous
works, the winkingly gothic milieu of 'Black Sun' extends into the three
dimensions of an installation. De Beer has filled the entirety of
Altria's modest gallery space with a pink structure that- in a metaphor
for her overall approach- suggests both dollhouse and haunted mansion.
Shown on a pair of hanging screens in its all-black interior (complete
with matching shag rug and extra-large bean bag chairs, natch) the video
opens, in the first of the works many operative mirrorings, outside what
appears to be a maquette of the very same structure, bathed in a tart
green and red light. The scene then shifts and we see a girl in a
nightgown moving tentatively across the purposefully artificial set
toward a door behind which a maternal figure sleeps. Its a sequence that
will be repeated, with slight variations, in three interconnected
"acts", each designed to track a formative stage in the protagonist's
journey towards individuation.

Throughout the work, such
establishing shots of portended confrontation between Mother and
Daughter are alternated with skillfully orchestrated moments of action
and of interiority. Utilizing techniques that suggest the loopings and
enfoldings of Doug Aitken's multiscreen videos, de Beer crates intricate
rhythms with the twinned screens (sometimes using them to explicitly
double each other, at others dividing one image between the two) to
weave several overlapping marrative threads, featuring two
similar-looking actresses, into an elaborate whole.

First, a
slide show sequence pictures objects- porcelain kitties, girlish
bracelets, nylons- that describe a trajectory of femininity accompanied
by the young girls reading of a diaristic passage on the inter-related
anxieties of memory and identity (taken, like all the work's words apart
from its intertitles, from Dennis Cooper's fifth novel, 'Period'
(2000)). We then see her testing her nascent sexuality by doing an
awkwardly sensuous Flashdance routine with the ur-symbol of
masculinity, a horse- here sublimated within the form of a stuffed
animal that comes to life in her bedroom. In the video's teenage
segment, the girl (now played by the slightly older of the two
actresses) repairs to a creepy fake graveyard where she describes, in
voice-over, a desire for magical control over love as she and her
boyfriend, dressed in sheets and skeleton masks, drink and fumble with
each other. Later the girl, alone in the plywood cemetery, does a
matter-of-fact strip tease down to her very grown-up black lingerie. And
in the final, most oblique sequence, all three moments of the girls
development seem to fuse: Now dressed like a young professional
departing on a flight, the protagonist of this last episode has a kind
of wistful world-weariness that signifies maturity. As she eats an
airline dinner and dons an eyeshade, her doppelganger finally reaches
the precint of the maternal room, symbolically becoming her own Mother.

Like Kristeva's meditation on melancholia referenced by its
title, 'Black Sun' confronts issues of identity, memory, and longing.
Stylistically, however, it probably has more in common with the phrase's
literary source, a line by the eccentric nineteenth-century French poet
Gerard de Nerval ("My sole star is dead - and my constellated
lute / Bears the Black Sun of Melancholia. Nerval
described his verse as the product of a "supernaturalistic" state of
reverie, writing that "Our dreams are a second life"- a sentiment that
might just as well serve as a motto for the engrossing "supernaturalism"
of de Beer's work, and its use of uncanny distortians of time and place
to evoke the anxious process of adolescent psychosexual awakening.